Computational Displays - On Enhancing Displays using Computation

Displays have seen many improvements over the years. With advancements in pixel resolution, color gamut, vertical refresh rates and power consumption, displays today have become more personal and accessible devices for sharing and feeding information. Advancements in computer human interaction have provided novel interactions with current displays. Touch panels are now common and provide better interaction with the cyberworld shown on a device. Displays today have many shortcomings still. These include a rectangular shape, low color gamut, low dynamic range, lack of simultaneous focus and context in a scene, lack of 3D viewing, etc. Efforts are being made to create better and more natural displays than 2D flat rectangular screens we see today. Much research has gone into designing better displays including 3D displays, focus and context displays, HDR displays, etc. Such displays enhance a display directly using device level technologies such as physical, chemical and metallurgical means. This approach has been taken in the past but proves expensive and is hard to scale to better standards that may be needed in color, refresh rate, spatial and intensity resolution in the coming future. New paradigms must be explored to generate better displays that may provide better user experiences and are easy to view and interact with. The conventional direct approach requires new physical properties to be constantly discovered in order to push the envelop in display design. Such technologies are hard to come by and may take years to prove their merit, for them to be acceptable in the display design pipeline. An alternate is to use computation to enhance displays. Today computation is easily available and cheap. CPUs follow the Moore’s law for their ever expanding compute capabilities. Multi-core CPU architectures are now common - even in hand held devices. GPUs consisting of 1500 cores deliver 1:5Tera FLOPS for $500 today. This abundance of compute capability has been applied to various systems with much success. Many areas including computational photography, computational biology and human computer interactions take advantage of computation to enhance a base system. Displays too have been shown to benefit from such an approach. Fish tank virtual reality is an example of this, 3D viewing can be enabled for a head tracked viewer using standard displays in conjunction with computer graphics. Computation can thus be used to enhance displays or remove their shortcomings. Many displays are underway that combine computation with other means to provide better and natural user experiences. These may combine computation with optics, display arrangement, metallurgy, sensors, etc. to bring out more than what is available on existing displays. Such displays can collectively fall under the term Computational Displays. (more...)